Patterson, trustees join call for seminary offering_110303

Posted: 10/31/03

Patterson, trustees join call for seminary offering

FORT WORTH (BP)--Paige Patterson has joined Chuck Kelley in calling for creation of a W.A. Criswell Offering for Southern Baptist Convention seminaries.

Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, made the appeal to seminary trustees Oct. 21. He echoed the earlier words of Kelley, his brother-in-law, who is president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Faced with rising costs, seminary students are taking fewer hours per semester, working more and accumulating more educational debt, Patterson warned. And that ultimately will hamper ministry, he added.

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Posted: 10/31/03

Patterson, trustees join call for seminary offering

FORT WORTH (BP)–Paige Patterson has joined Chuck Kelley in calling for creation of a W.A. Criswell Offering for Southern Baptist Convention seminaries.

Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, made the appeal to seminary trustees Oct. 21. He echoed the earlier words of Kelley, his brother-in-law, who is president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Faced with rising costs, seminary students are taking fewer hours per semester, working more and accumulating more educational debt, Patterson warned. And that ultimately will hamper ministry, he added.

“No mission-sending agency will appoint any student from your school who has existing indebtedness,” he explained. “The average Southern Baptist church has less than 200 people in Sunday School. If students graduate with a large amount of debt, they will not be able to make enough money to climb out of debt from their education and pastor those churches.”

The SBC's Cooperative Program, which today provides about 38 percent of the cost of seminary operations, cannot fund the seminaries at the level needed without taking money away from missions, Patterson warned.

“Fifty percent of the funds are given through churches to the International Mission Board. How are we going to up the percentage of what comes to the seminaries? The only way to do that is to take away from the IMB. It's not going to happen. Or the North American Mission Board; it's not going to happen.

“I can see no hope for the funding of increasingly expensive institutions … .”

Leaders of the SBC Executive Committee have opposed creation of a seminaries offering.

An SBC Funding Study Committee recently recommended the convention would be better served by educating Southern Baptists about the Cooperative Program and challenging them to follow the biblical model of tithing.

Patterson acknowledge it was understandable that some Southern Baptist leaders feared the offering as an attempt to return to the “society days,” a period before the Cooperative Program when each organization raised its own support.

The goal of the seminary offering, he said, would not be to harm the Cooperative Program or “kill the goose that laid the golden egg.”

“My own response is that such a view is shortsighted, because in your own church, when you are getting people to give, the more they give the more they give,” Patterson said.

Southwestern trustees voted to draft a resolution of support for the offering idea and forward it to the Executive Committee.

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